The assembly of proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell has a significant influence on contact pressure of BP and GDL, which affects key parameters of GDL including contact resistance, porosity, and permeability. In this study, a large-scale finite element method (FEM) PEM fuel cell model is developed considering realistic assembly, which is assembled by 14 bolts. The contact pressure at the interface of GDL and BP is converted into non-uniform contact resistance incorporated into a self-developed “3D + 1D” full PEM fuel cell multi-phase model with the active area of 108 cm². The “3D + 1D” model simplifies part of components along through-plane direction into 1D model to improve calculation efficiency and stability. The results show that the performance reduces slightly when considering non-uniform contact resistance compared with that considering uniform contact resistance. The uniformity of current density and temperature distributions reduces evidently when considering non-uniform contact resistance affecting the performance and durability, which demonstrates the necessity of treatment of non-uniform contact resistance. Furthermore, the effects of porosity and permeability of deformed GDL under different preloading torques on performance are investigated. It is found that the contact resistance reduces first and then flats as the preloading torques increase, which results in the same trend of electronic ohmic loss, while the concentration loss nearly linearly increases. The simulation shows that the PEM fuel cell shows the best performance when the preloading torque is 3 Nm. This study provides some meaningful guidance for PEM fuel cell stack assembly.

质子交换膜 (PEM) 燃料电池的组装对 BP 和 GDL 的接触压力有显着影响，这会影响 GDL 的关键参数，包括接触电阻、孔隙率和渗透率。在本研究中，开发了一种考虑实际装配的大型有限元法 (FEM) PEM 燃料电池模型，该模型由 14 个螺栓组装而成。将GDL和BP界面处的接触压力转化为非均匀接触电阻并入自主研发的“3D+1D”全PEM燃料电池多相模型，活性面积为108 cm ². “3D+1D”模型将沿平面方向的部分元件简化为1D模型，提高计算效率和稳定性。结果表明，与考虑均匀接触电阻相比，考虑非均匀接触电阻时性能略有下降。当考虑影响性能和耐久性的不均匀接触电阻时，电流密度和温度分布的均匀性明显降低，这表明处理不均匀接触电阻的必要性。此外，研究了不同预紧力矩下变形 GDL 的孔隙率和渗透率对性能的影响。发现随着预紧力矩的增加，接触电阻先减小然后变平，这导致了相同的电子欧姆损耗趋势，而浓度损失几乎呈线性增加。仿真表明，当预载扭矩为 3 Nm 时，PEM 燃料电池表现出最佳性能。本研究为 PEM 燃料电池堆组装提供了一些有意义的指导。